


A Modest Ventilation II: Love and Marriage Boogaloo

by Omnicat



Series: Two Modest Ventilations [2]
Category: Timeless (TV 2016)
Genre: Author Buries Feelings Under Ten Feet Of Sarcasm And Is Still Overcome By Them: The Fic, Breaking the Fourth Wall, Crack, F/M, Feels, Fix-It
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-30
Updated: 2020-10-30
Packaged: 2021-03-08 23:22:25
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,898
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27274885
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Omnicat/pseuds/Omnicat
Summary: In which Flynn leaves his wife and child without a word of explanation because he gets to make decisions for the entire family without consulting either of them. That’s just a good husband and father talking, not a traumatized, passively-suicidal, self-loathing wreck. /s
Relationships: Flynn & Lorena & Iris, Lorena/Flynn
Series: Two Modest Ventilations [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1991470
Comments: 9
Kudos: 9





	A Modest Ventilation II: Love and Marriage Boogaloo

**Author's Note:**

> I have _so many_ feelings about Flynn’s little “and then I walk away forever” monologue in the David Rittenhouse episode, but all the fix-it fics where I go into that in any serious capacity are taking way too long to finish. So to get it out of my system until I need it again, here’s almost three thousand words of sarcasm and crack to the same effect!
> 
> ‘Tata’ means ‘father/dad’ in Croatian.

One day, out of the blue, Lorena’s husband came home looking like death warmed over and had a nervous breakdown. He cried hysterically at the sight of her, hugged her way too long and tight, and then pushed her away and manfully proclaimed:

"Lorena, we have to divorce."

"What? Why?" Lorena said, looking at him with one part alarm and three parts ‘have you lost your mind’, because what else _was_ there to say to something like that.

Flynn was a little taken aback by her flat disbelief. In his head, this had always immediately led to tearful pleas for him to reconsider. Which had then, depending on whether he was feeling extra terrible that day or not as terrible as usual, always led to either him gently pushing her away and walking out the door to the slow-motion sounds of his greatcoat flapping in a dramatic wind and Lorena sobbing as she collapsed onto the kitchen floor, her heart breaking badly enough that she never tried to see him again and all the paperwork was done by mail, or him taking her in his arms in apology and comfort, soothing her until she accepted the necessity of their separation, holding her hand as they signed the divorce papers, and getting one last, lingering kiss goodbye at the end. Not this ‘excuse you? that’s outrageous’ meets ‘oh no, he didn’t scramble his brain in an explosion again, did he?’ look she was giving him right now.

But he pulled himself together and said, all tragic and noble: "I can’t tell you, but it’s better this way."

Like any sensible human being, Lorena said: "Um, no. We are not getting divorced for no damn reason."

Like the overly dramatic redeemed antivillain he was, Flynn insisted: "There is a reason, but it’s impossible to explain."

"We are not getting divorced for reasons you can’t even be assed to say to me out loud, either."

"You’ll think I’m insane."

"Try me."

He hesitated. She raised an eyebrow and crossed her arms. He talked.

She raised her eyebrow higher. He talked more.

Finally, she considered. "Soooo, to sum up: time travel, Iris and I being murdered, lots of unsanctioned killing to retroactively save us _and_ up to three hundred years of basically the entire planet, which, depending on _how_ you actually lived to save and see me again today, may all be permanent, may have since all been undone by a sweeping change to history from the time of the Founding Fathers onward, or may be anything in between?"

"Yes." He lowered his head in deep, deep shame.

"Okay, maybe that _is_ insane. Definitely sounds like the kind of psychotic episode a war veteran and secret service agent carrying around a lot of unresolved guilt and paranoia might have. But you know what’s _worse_ than insane? Just up and getting divorced because you’ve either experienced a psychotic episode or turned into the antihero in a scifi thriller. That’s _idiotic_ , sweetheart," she said, ever so gently. "Now sit your ass down and let me make you comfortable. If you’re really serious about all this, I’ll call your old therapist."

"I had completely forgotten about ther–awizdz," he admitted as she wrapped him in a blanket, poured him hot tea, and shoved a home-made cookie in his mouth halfway through that last word.

"I could tell," she said dryly. "They have couple’s councilors too. Remember those?"

They had to take a short break so he could chew and swallow. Lorena realized their mistake, thought fast, and voiced his thoughts along with her own:

“Whatever the truth is, figuring out how to talk about it with a shrink would be a hassle, I know. But it’s not like they just throw people who pose no danger into the asylum nilly-willy these days, and you’re used to working around classified information with the doc anyway. They’d hardly kick up a fuss if you chose to talk about your issues in terms of time travel ‘metaphors’ this time around, right?”

Flynn nodded. True, true.

“Might cost you your job if the NSA found out, but that would be the worst of it.”

“Heartbreaking prospect,” Flynn muttered, somewhat guiltily cheered by the thought, as crumbs spilled down his blanket-wrapped front. Once his mouth was empty, he went on, with renewed vigor: “But Lorena, I have become a monster. I’m not worthy of you or Iris any longer.”

"Except what we consider worth it isn’t your decision to make, it’s ours."

"You two don’t deserve to be stuck with the stain and burden I’ve turned into."

"Translation: I believe my wife didn’t mean the ‘in sickness and in health’ and ‘for better or worse’ parts of our vows the way _I_ , judging by everything I just told her, obviously _did_. Either that, or I let her take those vows under false pretenses because I never actually intended to give her any choice in the matter. She and our daughter deserve to lose the person they love most in the world because it was never about them or our family as a whole, just about _my_ feelings and _me me me_ ," Lorena said with eminently convincing conviction. But then she kept going and getting even more fired up, voice rising and hands gesturing wildly. "And that’s not just my opinion – or if my wife is feeling generous, which for the record, she is; not _even_ my opinion. It’s the freaking _universe’s_ opinion. It’s the closest thing we have to a pantheon’s opinion. My family is just a prop in my story, and the writers of that story don’t think the fate of bit characters like them is worth any consideration except as it serves a more important character’s story."

He made a shushing motion and hissed, "Too meta, dial it down."

She huffed, planting one hand in her side and waving the other as if to dismiss the entire thing. "Okay, okay. Just saying. The murder of a little girl is a tragedy and a crime worth undoing even if daddy decides he doesn’t care anymore and would rather find his peace by laying down and dying himself. Because yes, it’s very sad for daddy, but that little girl – and her mom, if I do say so myself – deserved to be saved for no other reason than because _they_ were human beings too. Their right to live was never freaking about _him_. Just as the dead sister’s right to live was never about her sister’s feelings, and the other dead wife’s right to live was never about _her_ husband’s feelings, and the fact that _she_ was resurrected by the bad guys for the express purpose of being indoctrinated and used by them makes her _more_ in need of saving than ever, not less, and still just as deserving of it. And don’t even get me _started_ about how you died. Sure, you can't start fixing absolutely everything ever just because you have a time machine now, because where would it _end?_ You'd turn into Rittenhouse 2.0 before you knew it. But is using time travel to save a handful of people who are only dead or non-existent in the first place specifically _because_ of time travel so much to ask? I just – the idea that anybody would – the way that the only thing that mattered about the fate of all this story’s fridged loved ones in the end was whether or not the POV characters could do without them? That only the dead _main_ character gets to be saved, and everybody else is not just expendable, they’re almost literally framed as ‘acceptable sacrifices’ to ensure the happiness of somebody more important? It leaves a _really_ bad taste in my mouth."

He threw his hands up in defeat. "I’ve completely lost the script now."

"Sorry." Lorena took a deep breath, threw herself onto the couch beside him, and stuck her hands under her arms as if to restrain herself. "I know that’s not the rant that was on the schedule today, but it just makes me so mad!"

Flynn wormed one arm out of his blanket cocoon and wrapped it around her shoulders. Though still vibrating with unscripted outrage, she burrowed into him.

"I don’t disagree, for the record," he murmured, pressing his nose into her hair. "It’s just that with all this fight or flight instinct in my system, I’m having enough trouble focussing on my lines and not doing something stupid again as it is."

"Um..." Lorena rubbed her face and squeezed his hand. "I think you still had something about not being the man I used to know?"

"Right, and you’d shoot back with you not being a high schooler anymore either, and Iris no longer being the embryo in her first ultrasound picture, and how I wouldn’t leave _you_ if our roles were reversed and you got hit by a truck and turned into a wheelchair-bound agoraphobiac."

"Yeah, exactly. ‘People change every day, big whoop, just because it’s a bigger change than usual today doesn’t mean I suddenly didn’t sign up for this after all’, all that."

"Oh, and something about morals and god and the hubris of changing history and... stuff."

"Right," Lorena half-sighed, half-growled. "Like suddenly you doing shady and violent shit would be a dealbreaker just because you were no longer doing it for the sainted US government. And obviously any philosophical approach that doesn’t treat the last known version of history as sacred and inviolable is unthinkable for a good, innocent, godfearing woman like me. Even though the show left the possibility wide open that we’re already on timeline five hundred and eighty seven or whatever."

"Yep," he said, awkwardly bouncing his feet beneath his blanket. Come to think of it, he was still wearing the boots he’d been traipsing through unspeakable eighteenth century muck in mere hours before. Good thing this wasn’t their real couch or carpet and the power that brought them here, alive and together, didn’t care about drycleaning costs. "And then Iris."

"And then Iris." Standing, Lorena kissed the crown of his head and squeezed his shoulder. "I’ll go get her. Relax, we’re almost done."

He nodded, but scarfed down another two cookies to smother his nerves.

Iris entered the scene and promptly asked: "Wow, tata, are you sick?"

Flynn, of course, promptly had another crying fit, complete with dragging her into an overenthusiastic bear hug. No script required for that one.

"Tata will be done in a minute, sweetie," Lorena whispered to Iris, who squeaked at her in alarm. "Just let him get it out of his system."

Eventually, he let Iris go and said grimly: "Alright, do what you gotta do."

Lorena tidied a stunned and wobbly Iris’s clothes and hair, and then sat her down on the couch between him and her.

"Iris, if tata hit his head in an accident and lost a lot of his memories of you, would you prefer that he’d go away and never come back because he can’t be exactly the tata you remember anymore, or that he stays here to make new memories with you?"

Iris looked dismayed. "Stay! Why would you leave?!"

"And if tata was sad a lot because he’d had to do some bad things to protect us, would you want him to go away or stay?"

"Stay! We never fail to make you feel better, tata, you’re always saying so!"

"I am, aren’t I?" he sniffled. He pulled Iris into his arms again, and this time she hugged back.

His eyes shot to the ceiling and all the corners of the room, looking for a sight line with the volatile power that had made all this possible. Godlike figure vs doomed antihero or not, it would rue the day it decided to rope them into making its points for it if this exercise was causing his little girl genuine distress.

 _Relax,_ the power told him. _The backstory for this rant involves top-notch child actor emotional guidance for Iris. Plus, I promised her you’d get her a kitten if she played along._

Flynn frowned. _Lorena is allergic to animal dander._

 _Not anymore~! :D_ the power sing-songed, impossible tilde and emoji sound effects and all.

"Okay!" Lorena said before Flynn’s head could explode from the forbidden sounds he was being exposed to, and clapped her hands together with pointed cheer and an even more pointed look directly at the creative power. "I think that settles it, don’t you?"

Flynn reviewed his mental script and cleared his throat.

"Yes. You’re right, I was so busy self-flagellating I didn’t actually think this through at all. Calming down and maybe talking to a professional should definitely be our first step," he recited.

"Right! Iris, sweetie, why don’t you go upstairs, pick a bath bomb, and draw your tata the princessiest bath you can? That always makes him feel better."

"It does?" Flynn asked.

"Oh, yeah. We started doing it about two years ago, so if you were really off time-traveling, you wouldn’t remember it. Trust me though, you’ll love it."

"Okay!" Iris chirped. She pecked Flynn on the cheek and conveniently disappeared from the stage.

Still wibbling with badly processed emotion, Flynn wrestled out of his blanket-straightjacket. Cookie crumbs landed everywhere. Lorena took a deep, bracing breath and ran a hand through her hair. Only then did she turn to face him and clasped her hands, preparing for her own last, hardest set of lines.

"Now, if the problem at hand was getting us out of each other’s hair so you could hook up with, say, a certain enemies-to-friends-to-sometimelines-lover of yours, that’s a whole other rant," she said. "But that one _also_ starts with the fact that neither _‘I refuse to even try talking to my wife, so since you were there and I don’t have to explain any of what happened to_ you _, you’re the better romantic option; unwillingness to communicate is a great foundation for a relationship!’_ nor _‘I’m too much of a monstrous scumbag to go back to my beloved family, but somehow I’m not an equally bad and burdensome prospect for a new relationship with_ you _; the self-loathing that drove me away from my last love definitely isn’t going to rear its head ever again, let alone ruin this relationship too!’_ are in any way good starting points for a relationship."

"Nothing happened in this timeline," Flynn blurted out.

Lorena’s eyes widened. That wasn’t in the script.

"It’s... different when you know it might be coming. Every time it felt like the situation was leading up to it, I couldn’t stop comparing it to what I had with you," he said, slowly and awkwardly. What he muttered next was neither of those things: "Plus, the show put our you-know-what’s two favorite couples in such cruel positions in relation to each other, it prefers not to cross the streams of its incompatible ships unless they’re building up to a threesome. So it conveniently Made It So that nothing happened in the parts of the story that aren’t canon, too."

"Oh," Lorena said, flustered. "Well... even if it had happened, I was dead and you had yourself convinced we couldn’t be together anymore even if I did come back. It’s not so strange to think you’d seek comfort with the only person who gave you hope for so long."

"I don’t know if the you from that other timeline would’ve said the same."

"I don’t know either, but we’re not in that timeline anymore, okay?" She blinked back tears. "Did you fall out of love with me?"

Getting slapped would have hurt him less. "No."

"Then that’s the end of it," she said with finality, and quickly dabbed at her eye. "No matter the timeline."

He gave her a pained look. "You know there’s no guarantee you’ll still feel so cavalier about any of this once we’re done playing thinly-veiled mouthpieces in a fan-author’s rant and are just people again who aren’t buoyed up by anybody else’s indignation, right?"

"I know. But what _is_ guaranteed is that it would be a dick move for you to not give me any say in this, make up my mind for me, and take the decision to dissolve our marriage and give up on all of our happiness out of my hands. Yes, there is a chance this will ruin some things, or even everything. But it’s by no means guaranteed to unless you _make_ it that way. And I know –" Lorena’s voice broke. "– this isn’t what you _want_ , Garcia. Not any more than I do. It’s the pain talking, not your heart."

"I’ve never stopped loving you," he swore thickly, eyes glassy. "Either of you. I just..."

"Stopped loving yourself?" Lorena finished quietly.

"Yes."

"Well." She cupped his cheek and smiled through her tears. "At least give us a chance to love you enough to help you fix that, huh?"

Pressing into her hand, he closed his eyes. "Okay."

And then they woke up.

Next to each other. In their own, real bed. Alive, and safe, and comfortable. Awake enough to know there was something very curious about the dream they’d just shared, but still too sleepy to focus on anything but two things. Each other – touching each other incredulously, holding each other close, soaking in each other’s warmth – and...

"So we’re getting a cat?"

"We’re getting a cat."


End file.
